


The Feeling of Being in Motion Again

by uro_boros



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 07:15:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14279757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uro_boros/pseuds/uro_boros
Summary: “You don’t know how to want,” the therapist says.Steve thinks of being eleven and watching the children play stick ball out of his window, because he was too sick to play with them. He thinks of full lips, blue eyes, an orange, the warm murmur of Bucky Barnes’ voice in his good ear. Of a bombed out bar in Germany and a bottle of alcohol that did nothing to him. Of the ice, as his heart slowed, and he thought, end of the line.“I know how to want,” he tells her.





	The Feeling of Being in Motion Again

These are the things Steve remembers: For Christmas, Bucky gives him an orange. It’s ice cold and tart, and it stains his nail beds when he peels the skin. He tastes its scent on his tongue before he bites into the flesh. It’s the best thing he’s had in years.

He says, “Thanks, Buck,” after he finishes half, holding up the other part to Bucky to share. There’s juice on his chin, sticky, and on his fingers. 

Bucky waves his half off. “It’s yours,” he says, and there’s something in the blue of his eyes, something dark and hungry, but Steve is eighteen and the year is 1936. You don’t comment on the look in your best friend’s eye when he gives you an orange for Christmas. You take, and you take, and you satiate yourself with scraps and fleeting sweetness.

These are the things Steve remembers: a chasm and the howling wind and the look in Bucky’s eye as he fell.

—

SHIELD doesn’t put him in therapy. Sam does, because Sam is good like that, understanding like that, looks at him and says, “I can be your friend or your therapist, but not both, Steve, and I’d prefer to be your friend.” 

Steve doesn’t say, in my day, we called it shell-shock, and we tucked it away with our other broken pieces, but it’s times like these that make him feel the seventy years stretched between his world and this one. He likes the future, if he’s being honest, but it feels like a bad dream every day when he wakes up. Sam says therapy will help with that, so Steve goes.

The therapist is pretty and professional, and her skirt sits a little high on her knees. She wears stockings, nylons. She clicks her pen when Steve speaks and writes careful, precise notes.

“You can buy a bushel of oranges,” he tells her. “Eight or ten, any time of the year.”

And because he’s Steve Rogers, seventy years out of time, she’s done her research. She smiles, and her red lipstick is a little too dark to prick at him, a fact for which he’s grateful, and feels silly for being grateful for — she smiles, and she says, “In the 1930s, they would have been a treat. An orange for Christmas. A handful of walnuts. Does the luxury bother you?”

“The luxury doesn’t bother me.” 

Bucky used to wrap an arm around Steve’s skinny shoulders and describe the future — “We’re going to go to California, pal,” he’d say, because California was where dreams came to life, where the bright sun would sink into Steve’s bones and heal his congested lungs, fix his back, clear his chest. That California didn’t exist, not really, but the thought of California kept them going through hard winters and the worst of the Depression. In California, they’d finally be warm, and no one would look sideways at them if Bucky’s hands lingered a little longer than necessary. In California, they’d feast like kings and sleep on feathered mattresses, and two Brooklyn boys would shed their skins and emerge from the wine-dark Pacific as who they really wanted to be. California had groves of orange trees, Bucky said, and they’d eat one every day.

Luxury doesn’t bother Steve. What bothers him is: California’s only a five hour flight, and he could hop on a plane at any time and stand in the orchards under the warm sun and the wide blue sky, and Steve would be in California, the future Bucky dreamed of, and Bucky would still be dead.

Bucky died in the ice, so Steve died in the ice, too. 

—

In 1929, Sarah Rogers kneels on the floor of her Brooklyn apartment and folds her hands in prayer. Steve doesn’t hear what she says — he’s eleven years old, and his lungs are filled with water, and the last doctor to visit suggested she call the priest next time instead. They’ve dragged his small bed out into the kitchen, next to the stove, in hopes of keeping him warm. 

It’s November. The world is ending. Sarah Rogers prays for relief, for her son, for herself. She prays for her husband, who she buried six months pregnant and who will never know his son. She prays that God forgives her, that God gives her just one more year, one more chance, one more second.

She prays until her knees are raw from kneeling and her back aches, and she prays until her tears run out so that she’s dry-eyed. She prays for hours, until little James Buchanan Barnes lets himself in through the fire escape and picks her up.

“Mrs. Rogers,” he says, helping her to the table before making himself busy stoking the fire in the stove, “that ain’t good for your knees.”

“You’re supposed to knock,” she chides him, but there’s no heat to her words and James Barnes knows it. 

Steve’s form is draped with every blanket and long piece of cloth they have in the apartment. Under them all, he’s shivering, and his pale forehead is beaded with sweat.

“They said you shoulda called a priest,” says James Barnes, twelve years old and chest puffed out like he’s a man. He’s the oldest of Winnifred Barnes’ four children, and the year is 1929, and the markets have crashed. Perhaps he is a man. “They’re all stupid. Stevie will make it.” 

She smiles at him, too tired and too weak to do anything else, and when he’s finished fussing over Steve in his bed, Sarah takes James Barnes’ little hand, with its little callouses, and kisses his knuckles. “Thank you,” she murmurs, “for loving him.”

She knows her son isn’t easy to love. Between sickness and a bad temper and his swinging fists, Steve has never been easy to love. Loving him has wrecked her — she’s felt its ghost pass into her own body like a lump, where its metastasized and grown and consumed. She knows that it has wrecked little James Barnes, who is twelve and doesn’t yet realize he loves her son, but follows him into every fight and yells at the doctor when he says to call the priest.

Steve makes it through that November. When Christmas comes, and she has nothing to give her son, she invites James over for a dinner with a scrap more meat than their usual. 

It’s a gift for them both.

—

To the therapist, he says, “The luxury doesn’t bother me. But people don’t want things in the same way. They want too much. Things are too easy.” He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.

It feels selfish to admit.

The therapist makes a noise, encouraging. Steve knows he doesn’t talk much in these sessions. People talk too much now.

“Things are too easy. People don’t know how to struggle or go without. I’m not — I don’t mind that. It’s good. It’s good that people don’t die of polio or rheumatic fever. But people want so much.”

“You don’t know how to want,” she says.

Steve thinks of being eleven and watching the children play stick ball out of his window, because he was too sick to play with them. He thinks of full lips, blue eyes, an orange, the warm murmur of Bucky Barnes’ voice in his good ear. Of a bombed out bar in Germany and a bottle of alcohol that did nothing to him. Of the ice, as his heart slowed, and he thought, _end of the line._

“I know how to want,” he tells her.

—

A man who wears Bucky’s face is sitting on his couch.

Steve goes to the kitchen. He puts on a pot of coffee. He takes down two mugs from his cabinet. His hands are shaking. He wills them to stop.

The man who wears Bucky’s face says nothing. He doesn’t move at all. He’s so still that Steve thinks he might not even be real, just a figment of his imagination. It wouldn’t be the first time that Steve’s dreamed of Bucky.

“Bucky,” Steve says, and realizes it’s the first time he’s said Bucky’s name since. Since.

Bucky looks at him.

Bucky looks at him.

Bucky looks at him, and his eyes are blue, and his mouth is full, and the corners are tugging at a small smile. His hair is longer than he ever wore it before. There’s scruff on his chin. He’s bigger, and heavier, and more dangerous.

But when his lips part, he says, “Steve,” sucking air around the word like the gasp of a dying man, and Steve is on his knees, spilled coffee soaking his pants, and his face is wet. His face is wet.

“Aw, come on,” says Bucky softly, “don’t cry over me, Stevie. I’m here. I’m here.”

The last time Steve cried was in 1945. But he has wanted to since.

It’s a release.


End file.
